


The Last Star In The Sky (rewritten, original)

by ice_hot_13



Category: Original Work
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-03-31
Updated: 2012-03-31
Packaged: 2017-11-02 20:12:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,491
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/372938
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ice_hot_13/pseuds/ice_hot_13
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Being with Ava is to live something so beautiful, it's like catching a glimpse of another dimension.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Last Star In The Sky (rewritten, original)

**Author's Note:**

> Re-write of The Last Star In The Sky, submitted for Creative writing major application.

            Daniel has always scoffed at people whose relationships are effortless, like falling into place. With him and Ava, it was like falling into place after a tornado ravaged everything, ripped through the world, made the sky the ground, something to fall through forever. Ava was always impossible to pin down with a single description.

            "You have the most cynical sense of humour in the world," Daniel muttered once.

            "And yet–” Ava said, and he could already hear her laughing.

            "And yet, I love it. That just means there's something wrong with me. And you, if you're using _me_ to judge normality."

_(I used you to define everything and it felt right, so what happens when you can't define anything, what happens to the whole entire world)._

            When everything felt like fighting, there was winning, and when he had Ava, losing didn’t seem possible.

 

            Daniel used to dread writing fill-in notes for his history class; it’s the worst part of student teaching. It feels like taking a living story and tying it down, tearing away the pieces that matter. His tenth graders are learning about the Renaissance, and he can imagine the cities at that time, the places where corners took a twist and walls rose up like an afterthought, plazas that were a jumble of uneven lines and cobbled streets. In the notes, the images become short sentences and flat lines, missing pieces everywhere.  It was agonizing, until Ava filled in the gaps with her words, changing this just like she changed everything.

            As he makes copies, he flips through the notes to the sections he memorized, the ones that carry Ava’s voice. Daniel knows exactly where to find his strongest memories with Ava; it feels like an instinct, like finding his way home. He flips to the part about Florence, with the picture of Ponte Vecchio, the bridge spanning over the pale water below.

            _“Did you know that lovers used to chain locks to the railing? They’d throw the keys into the river, it was a symbol of eternal love. Of course, the locks all got cut off by the police. How utterly everlasting.”_ Ava, for all her impatience with things like superstition and signs, seemed to hunt them down through history, fascinated at how out of place they seemed. __

_(lots of things are out of place, it doesn't make them wrong, sometimes it makes them beautiful, and sometimes things happen that shouldn't and that's when the world should just break into a million pieces so no one feels it anymore)._

            Daniel has always loved things like this, superstition and symbols; to him, they’re small instance of untouchable beauty, to give all the senses the gift of the intangible.

            Ava was right about the how police cut off the locks and muttered about amorous fools, Daniel read that in a history book, but she was wrong in thinking that nothing is everlasting. Daniel wants to go to the bridge himself, with a lock in hand, and lock it somewhere no one can reach. _Everlasting,_ he thinks, and he’s always wanted to take Ava to Florence one day, to see if maybe somehow, there’s a lock out there, outlasting even time and the impossible.

 

            Daniel met Ava when they both ended up in a four-person house-share, and it didn’t take long for them to gravitate towards each other. Just like magnets, they were drawn together, except when their polarity changed, and they clashed and jerked away.

            It was small and insignificant, but Daniel couldn’t _stand_ how Ava was incapable of putting away her shoes. He tripped over them when he walked in the door, and even from a room away, he could hear her sigh.

            “If you would move them just _once-”_ he called out, hearing only the sound of a book being slammed shut in response. “Seriously, it’s not that hard.”

            “And it wouldn’t kill you to just let it _go,_ Dan,” she snapped back, “It’s not a big deal!”

            “But it’d take you, what, six seconds to move them? I’m _sure_ you can manage that!”

            Daniel hates every fight they had over her shoes. It was stupid and inane, and every time he thinks about it, he wishes he could have just _let it go._ He’s always thought she deserved the best, but every time they fought, all it did was break another piece of the perfect world he could have given her.

 

            For as much as it surprised their roommates, Daniel wasn’t blindsided at all when it turned out he was in love with Ava; it felt like it just made _sense_ that the world would turn out this way. Ava may have wrecked Daniel's whole world, but then she rebuilt it, created something breathtaking and impossible, the kind of world no one can build for themselves.

            “I just don’t understand,” Daniel had said once, flipping through one of her books on Greek mythology, stories that had been her fairytales as a child, “Orpheus was just a guy, and Eurydice was like, a nymph. So she was beautiful, amazing, everything. Why were they together? I mean, I can see why he’d love her, but why would _she_ want _him?_ ” __

He remembers the words to the story now, once by heart and now as if they had become part of him, remembers Ava’s voice as she retold it to him, something meant just for him.

            “Forgive a moment of sappy romanticism, but it’s because she loved Orpheus the way I love you, Daniel.”

            Ava made Daniel feel like poetry was a living, breathing thing of beauty that lived in words, alive and ever-changing and more beautiful than any human was capable of. Some things created themselves, and Daniel had always thought that these sudden moments of breathlessness came from somewhere so beautiful, they could only ever be seen in pieces.

 

            Calculus never was Daniel's strong point, but he had always been fascinated by how there were terms for everything. _Inflection point_ was a term that had always stuck with him. It was the point where everything suddenly changed, where the slope took a different turn, like the angle of the very earth shifted. Just like that, Daniel remembers the exact moment he realized that he was going to marry Ava. There was a moment when he realized that living without Ava would be more like dying, that he loved her in a way that made everything before the day they met seem like it was just leading up to finding her, like he'd been designed just for this. It was realizing that loving Ava wasn't just a chapter of the story of his life, it _was_ the story.

            The morning sun was spilling across their bedroom, soaking up all the lingering darkness of night. All Daniel could hear was Ava's even breathing beside him and the metered turning of pages, their combined rhythm practically as familiar as his own heartbeat.

            "Hey," Daniel murmured, kissing her neck, "what're you reading?"

            "One of those unspeakably awful science fiction novels of yours,” she said, sighing. “I mean, really – aliens I can handle. But aliens that live inside mirrors and are building a machine that reverses time? And having a secret Aliens United sector of the government that meets in an underwater bomb shelter? _Really?_ ” 

            "And yet… you read it anyways? Despite this horribleness?"

            "I like it," Ava said, and when he kissed her face, Daniel could feel the way her cheeks went warm as she blushed. "It's your favourite kind of book, so… I mean, the plot is just awful, but I like it because you like it, and you just- everything you are, it's sort of- it's perfect."

            Daniel was never good at piecing together his feelings and coming up with words creative enough to explain every perfect nuance, but there were some that he knew would show everything, everything he ever wanted to say to her.

_(not everything, there was so much more, it was never supposed to end, because everything was so beautiful, but maybe the world can't handle something unearthly)._

            "I love you," he murmured, kissing Ava like a promise, "will you marry me?" And Ava had smiled like she understood everything he couldn’t find a way to tell her.

            Ava was Daniel's everything. In a world of darkness, she was the only beautiful moment left.

 

            Daniel replays the memories over and over, but he can never escape the reality, because living in a world with stars crafted only from memory can never be anything but living in a world of endless dark.

            He’s never regretted a single moment, because everything before Ava was there only to bring them together, and every moment together was to see perfection at its impossible, unmatchable best. Being with Ava was to live something so beautiful, it was like catching a glimpse of another dimension. What Daniel hates that there is a time _after_ Ava _._

            Ava has been dead for three years. 


End file.
